Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

It always seems to happen at the worst possible time, and it isn’t just Pro Tools, it happens with every single application I use everyday… Mail, DP, Word, Filemaker Pro you name it. There are just times when the application, inexplicably, is not very happy about running a session, the very same session you ran the day before! In Pro Tools land there are a few very good troubleshooting steps to take when things seem to go astray.

FIRST - RESTART YOUR MACHINE. Yes, I’m shouting at you. I once had someone working for me, in another room of a facility. He called me and said, “Jeanine I can’t do…” I said. “Hey, that sounds weird, why don’t you restart the machine.” An hour later, I wander by the room he is using and I say, “How are things going?” He says, “Ok, but it is a bit slow since I can’t do…” I make him stop, save and restart. Guess what? Once rebooted the machine and PT were very happy. So rather than waste the two minutes it takes to restart, my lovely assistant spent an hour working around an easily fixable problem…

SECOND - On the mac, repair permissions. The UNIX undercarriage of the Mac OS X system carries a lot of capability. Sometimes a thing known as “the permissions” for a file can be set incorrectly. It is a simple process to fix, go to your Utilities folder (inside the Applications folder) and open up the application called Disk Utility. Click on your drive in the left hand column and click on the First Aid tab in the top center of the window. Then click Repair Permissions and let it do its thing. Wonders will commence…